Earlier this month Antonio Brown made what might be the most dramatic exit in sports history, stripping down and stalking off the field in the middle of an NFL game, as his defending champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers were rallying against the lowly New York Jets on the road.
Eric Dickerson could never.
“Hell no,” says the 61-year-old Hall of Famer. “My mother would’ve killed me. I can’t speak for another man. I can’t speak for what’s on his mind. But I’ll say this: one day, when he gets to be an older man, he’ll look back and say, Maybe I shouldn’t have done that…”
Back in the 1980s and 90s Dickerson wasn’t just thought of as the Antonio Brown of that day. He was seen as even more sinister: a supremely arrogant running back who ruined Southern Methodist’s ascendant program, played hardball with the Los Angeles Rams and otherwise sulked his way through 11 NFL seasons – all of them, by his reckoning, underpaid. Ingrate, Dickerson says, was how sportswriters most often described him. And to the ear of this proud native of Sealy, Texas – the tiny mattress-making town where he recalls whites and blacks literally living on opposite sides of the railroad track – that word sounded a bit too much like another that starts with an N. Before a 1990 game during his time with the Colts, Dickerson remembers jogging out for warmups and being greeted by a banner of a Black baby in his No 29 jersey wearing red lipstick, holding a fried chicken leg, with a watermelon on one side and a stack of money on the other. And these were Colts fans. “I was a bad, bad guy back in the 80s,” Dickerson says. “And then people meet me and are like, You ain’t nothin’ like they make you out to be.”
After decades of being cast as the ultimate heel Dickerson finally sets the record straight in Watch My Smoke, an autobiography he co-wrote with People magazine’s Greg Hanlon. In the book Dickerson pays homage to his adoptive parents, addresses the infamous Trans Am gift that nearly resulted in the NCAA banning Southern Methodist University from competitive football, and the ebbs and flows of his underheralded NFL career. Threaded throughout are digressions on race and the pill-popping that was in vogue during his NFL time – including his own use of Darvocet, a now-banned opioid painkiller, to calm his nerves before games. Dickerson even details his playboy misadventures off the field, not least the time he prematurely ended a romantic interlude with Pam Grier because he feared breaking his Rams curfew. “Every time I see her in a movie,” he cracks. “I’m like, You had your chance. You had it!”
As a talent Dickerson was sui generis, less tailback than tall back whose upright gait was as unorthodox as his habit of pairing racquetball specs with a Jheri curl. And while his 13,259 career yards (the league’s second-highest mark when he retired in 1993) have long since been eclipsed time and again, the five-time All-Pro owns what might be the only two records that really matter in pro football: the rookie single-season rushing standard (1,808) and the overall single-season rushing record (2,105), which Dickerson achieved the very next year. Not only have those numbers become more hallowed as the NFL has evolved into a pass-wacky league, but in the case of the single-season rushing mark, every player who comes close seems to fall apart shortly thereafter.
After cracking the 2,000-yard mark in his second season the Titans Chris Johnson never broke 1,400 yards for the rest of his career. Barry Sanders and Terrell Davis were out of the league shortly after summiting 2K. Adrian Peterson hasn’t been the same bruiser since he flirted with Dickerson’s record in 2012. And Derrick Henry missed half of this season after approaching the mark in 2020. If the record weren’t so out of reach, some might be inclined to believe it’s jinxed. “My teammates always say when a guy’s getting close, they pull the voodoo dolls out,” Dickerson jokes.
It’s Dickerson’s bad luck that he came along when he did. In his autobiography he reserves some of his harshest words for the NCAA, likening their student-athlete construct to “wage theft”. Despite being one of the most talented backs in college, he split carries in SMU’s Pony Express offense; despite averaging 7.0 yards per carry and finishing fourth in the country in rushing for the undefeated Mustangs as senior in 1982, Dickerson finished in the Heisman vote behind Stanford’s John Elway and Georgia’s Herschel Walker – who is campaigning as a Republican for that state’s open US Senate seat now. “Maybe that’s what he feels is right for him,” Dickerson says diplomatically. “I don’t agree with some of the things he’s said, for sure.”
In the pros Dickerson never made it farther than the 1985 conference championship, losing to the Super Bowl Shuffle Bears. As much as he enjoyed playing for coach John Robinson – a running game savant, in Dickerson’s view – he wonders what might’ve been had played up the coast with Joe Montana. “I played with him in the Pro Bowl and, man, his passes were just so easy to catch,” Dickerson says.
Dickerson is certainly poorer for having preceded the advent of free agency, when his ambition and self-determinist streak wouldn’t have marked him as an insufferable jerk. If anything comes across in the book and in conversation, it’s that Dickerson is quite pleasant company, a natural storyteller. You could see how he landed a post-retirement gig as a Monday Night Football sideline reporter in the early aughts – even if, by his own reckoning, he “was terrible at it”.
But before you go confusing Watch My Smoke for some Pippen-esque attempt to recoup lost wages, be clear: Dickerson isn’t hurting. He’s long been back with the Rams as an ambassador and long since made amends with the Colts and team owner Jim Irsay, whom he once derisively nicknamed “Daffy Duck”. And when Dickerson does make TV appearances, he doesn’t shy from using the platform to take current NFL players to task for not doing enough to look out for and otherwise support their forebears.
In Watch My Smoke, Dickerson relates a bit of foreshadowing he received from OJ Simpson. “When you turn 50,” the Juice told him, “those hits are gonna come back to you.” Apart from a back problem that makes for restless nights and a foot issue that dates to a 1984 turf toe injury, he’s held stout against the ravages of time. When news broke last year that the NFL’s testing protocols for head injury claims were biased against Black players, Dickerson could have broken into a touchdown dance. “We said that from the beginning, when the [2013 concussion] lawsuit started,” he says. “And they replied, ‘Well, we won’t do it again.’ They’ll continue to do it. They will never stop. Man, people are greedy. It’s a greed thing.”
That Dickerson has gone from the guy being called a money-grubber to the one pointing it out is sweet redemption. Did he see the day coming? Dickerson could never.
